


lost boy.

by foundCarcosa



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age II
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-28
Updated: 2013-02-28
Packaged: 2017-12-03 22:01:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/703096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A bleeding heart cannot be First Enchanter and succeed. But Orsino tries anyway, every single time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lost boy.

“It’s all right,” Orsino had murmured, his every brain cell and every muscle screaming in exhaustion, but his determination to sit up with the sobbing child unflagging. “You’re safe here. I promise you this. You’re safe.”

And the child had eventually gone from sobbing to sniffling, to hiccuping every couple of minutes, and by the time he slid into an uneasy sleep in Orsino’s loose embrace, the First Enchanter was already nodding off himself. And so he remained, until dawn.

“You’re too close to them,” Meredith had admonished him, severely, “far too close, and that is dangerous,” but he had stood his ground.

“I discipline those who require it. I keep explicit track of the apprentices’ progress and pass judgement on them without prejudice. I do my job.  
When a lad of eight has just been ripped from his family because he can’t stop himself from setting _his own bed_ on fire, what do you expect me to do?”

In the Circle, Dennys stopped setting his bed on fire.  
Instead, he fought with the other apprentices. He flipped off the templars. He flat-out refused to do his exercises when he didn’t feel like doing them. 

“Tell me what’s wrong,” Orsino pleaded with him, brow furrowed so tightly and earnestly that he felt the first twinges of a headache coming on. “Dennys, please. I’m here to help you. We all are. We want to see you succeed.”

He had the templars remove the scowling boy from his office moments later, slowly wiping the remaining drops of spittle from his face.

He wanted to be angry. He wanted to be angry, but he thought he understood all too well.

Adolescence brought a queer sort of calm to Dennys. Orsino allowed hope to flare in him, allowed himself to invest more energy and time in Dennys, allowed the boy to camp out in his office when lessons got to be too much, allowed Dennys to accompany him in the courtyard. He forgot that the time he spent in the courtyard was supposed to be personal — a kind of self-care. He forgot that the enchanters were hesitantly suggesting the inevitable as Dennys neared adulthood. He forgot that Meredith constantly berated him about his investment for a reason.  
He forgot that the Circle was more than just Dennys — more than just Orsino seeking to do for the boy what hadn’t been done for him so many years ago.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?” Orsino walks with his hands clasped behind his back, his head slightly bowed, following the subtle and calming curves of the labyrinth. Dennys tramps over it irreverently, uncaring about its integrity, but that is all right.

“All of this. Treating me like… like I’m your… _pet.”_

“Is that how you feel about it?” Orsino flinches from the sneer in Dennys’ last word. “This is what I do, Dennys. I don’t wish to see any of you children fall behind simply because no one took the time to see after your well-being.”

“Do you know what I did to my parents, Orsino?” Dennys doesn’t call him ‘First Enchanter’. Never did. Orsino never pressed the issue.

“Well, I’m not entirely—”

“I burned them, too.”

Orsino sighs and stops walking, fixing Dennys with a chiding eye. “Are you _trying_ to shock me? I assure you—”

“They told me I couldn’t go to the Feastday fair, because I’d chopped my sister’s hair off in her sleep with one of my father’s daggers.”  
Dennys spoke with perfect diction, as if giving a speech, his moss-green eyes impassive and his face unalarmingly blank — pleasant, even.  
“So I let the fire burn, and I went to Feastday anyway.  
The templars came too late. By that point, I was trying to set fire to more than just the silly old bed.”

Orsino, labouring under the impassivity of that stare, has to remind himself to breathe regularly. His jaw twitches, uncertainty bleeding into his expression, into the hope he’d built up over the years.

“I know who I am, Orsino. I know _what_ I am. Stop trying to fix me. Let the templars do what they’re going to do with me, because they’re going to do it anyway, and it’d be better for you if you didn’t fight them all the way to the Harrowing Chamber.” He smirks dryly when he catches the realisation dawning on Orsino’s face — he _knew,_ he knew everything, and no one need know _how_ he knew, because the damage was done.

Before he pulls open the door back into the fortress that was the Circle, he turns his head slightly and calls back, “By the way, that dorm room you put Alain in charge of? At least three of the girls in there are planning to hoodwink him.  
And Oren cries every night, but only stops because he’s shit-scared of the templars. They _are_ pretty scary, though, to a kid. I don’t blame him.  
Oh — and Justine’s been testing out ways to get into the forbidden section of the library for the past week. She might succeed if someone doesn’t stop her.

Just letting you know. First Enchanter.”

—

When they brand him — golden sun-symbol on a forehead as pale as death — Orsino feels his empty stomach clench and has to leave the chamber.

Meredith doesn’t say anything when he steps into her office and closes the door behind him, leaning against it as if it is the only thing holding him up. She waits, waits until he takes those first few steps towards her, and then she pushes away from the desk so he can slip to the floor between her knees, the pain of failure and confusion and frustration and the agony of loving that which can’t be loved etching lines into the skin above and below his shut-tight eyes.

Moments pass, and she lets her hand settle onto his hair, and he shakes his head and hitches his breath as if to speak, but the words are interrupted by sounds that might be sighs and might be sobs, and perhaps on the surface Meredith is still and statuesque and the rock upon which Orsino leans, but she knows the hurt all too well, and it is only the knowledge that keeps her steady -- the knowledge that if she breaks, they both break.

The next week, there is another traumatised apprentice, and the cycle begins anew.


End file.
